Nothing tells you what Guest Additions to install
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| virtualbox-ose (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Binary package hint: virtualbox-
This bug report is a spin-off of bug 738330.
When you install Ubuntu as the guest OS in Virtual Box, your natural first instinct is to install Guest Additions from the Virtual Box menu. According to comments in 738330 you shouldn't be doing this, instead you should install package virtualbox-
The problem is twofold:
There is nothing that tells you not to install the Guest Additions from within Virtual Box
The package virtualbox-
My solution would be to detect n startup if we're running in a Virtual Box and if so place a link on the desktop with an obvious name like "Install Guest Additions" that when clicked would quickly and easily install them.
I know this may sound like a trivial issue, but to a novice (such as somebody trying Ubuntu for the first time in vbox) it's a massive turn off (see bug 738330) which could make people give up on Ubuntu.
Ideally, I suppose we'd detect that they're in a vbox that could run the guest additions and install them automatically when they install Ubuntu, but that would probably be quick a lot of work?
| Changed in virtualbox-ose (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Confirmed |
| Michael Thayer (michael-thayer) wrote | #1 |
| Michael Thayer (michael-thayer) wrote | #2 |
| ludo33200 (ludo-cheron) wrote | #3 |
As the upstream maintainer of the Guest Additions I would like to relativise this somewhat. I certainly quite agree in the context that Felix made his comment in - since the development version of Ubuntu (currently Natty) is a moving target, Guest Additions from VirtualBox releases are unlikely to work well in it, whereas Felix keeps the Guest Additions package in Ubuntu up to date with not-yet-released fixes from upstream. For released versions of Ubuntu I would say that the difference is much smaller and that using the version which comes with VirtualBox can simplify things if the version you are using doesn't match the default Additions version in that Ubuntu release. (Note that I haven't actually investigated installing Additions for other versions of VirtualBox from repositories/ppas.) And I do take some care to make sure that installing the upstream version won't mess up your Ubuntu (or other GNU/Linux) system. I welcome reports of any cases where they do.